The FastDay Forum

[carieoates]

I know Carie..i miss @sue.qevery time i come on here..i do hope she's ok
And i miss some of those who to me are " oldtimers" ...those who'd already bean here months when i joined..
XX

@SallyO beats me by a couple of months. But it seems I am an "old timer"

Still wobbling along here. I've been visiting my sister for the past 3 days and we have been eating and shopping our time away! Brunch today and then I
I'm on my way home and back to a sense of normalcy. I won't manage a fast until Tuesday as I'm playing in a golf tournament tomorrow that will involve eating and drinking a bit.
Hope you're all enjoying your weekend!

@nursebean so sorry to hear you have bean wobbling too and hope to see you back in the saddle when you feel able.
I think I will go to the 'keeping within TDEE tent' to see who would like to come out to play as it might help some who are taking a break from fasting for whatever reason (going through a cycle as @Candicemarie describes it) and those who are aiming for TDEE.
AWOL, I wonder where peebles is too - did she every return from her holiday and if Ssure is having her long awaited surgery?
@Lori good luck with the golf tournament and eating a 'bit'

[carorees]

I'm sure this has been posted elsewhere but worth repeating: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... 1148135491

There are some really important insights in the article, such as:

I don't think people should try to live at a lower weight than their set range. If you try to lose weight so that you're below your set weight range, that I believe is folly, or farce. It's not healthy. It's what sets off all those biological changes that are effectively trying to defend your set range. When your body goes lower than your set range, it makes changes to bump your weight back into it. And what people don't know is that if your weight goes above it, it also makes changes to push it back down into the ideal weight.

After you diet, so many biological changes happen in your body that it becomes practically impossible to keep the weight off. It's not about someone's self-control or strength of will.

There are three biological changes that take place that seem most important to me.

The first is neurological. When you are dieting, you actually become more likely to notice food. Basically your brain becomes overly responsive to food, and especially to tasty looking food. But you don't just notice it — it actually begins to look more appetizing and tempting. It has increased reward value. So the thing you're trying to resist becomes harder to resist. So already, if you think about it, it's not fair.

Then there are hormonal changes, and it's the same kind of thing. As you lose body fat, the amount of different hormones in your body changes. And the hormones that help you feel full, or the level of those rather, decreases. The hormones that make you feel hungry, meanwhile, increases. So you become more likely to feel hungry, and less likely to feel full given the same amount of food. Again, completely unfair.

And the third biological change, which I think people do sort of know about, is that there are metabolic changes. Your metabolism slows down. Your body uses calories in the most efficient way possible. Which sounds like a good thing, and would be good thing if you're starving to death. But it isn't a good thing if you're trying to lose weight, because when your body finds a way to run itself on fewer calories there tends to be more leftover, and those get stored as fat, which is exactly what you don't want to happen.

If you think about it, people do drop below their set range and stay there. A small percentage of dieters — something like 5 percent — can do it. And they do do it. But they do it by devoting every minute of their life to staying at that weight. Basically, they spend their entire life living like a starving person, fighting biology, and evolution. And to me that seems wrong.

People who have the means to not be starving to death should not be starving to death. How can we ask that of people? It just seems outrageous to me.

What's really sad to me is that it isn't just society that blames dieters when they gain weight. Dieters blame themselves, and I really think that that's a shame. They're in a situation where food looks more tempting, they're hungrier than they should be, their body is getting by on fewer calories, and everything is just working against them. And yet people are always so quick to say, 'well, it was their hand holding the fork.'

I find that to be such a frustrating comment to respond to. Yes, it is their hand holding the fork, but it's the context that is much more important here. There are so many things that affect your ability to control what you do with that fork, that make it impossible to not pick it up. If I could help people understand anything, it would be that.

Willpower is actually a very different thing when you talk about eating. Willpower can be extremely useful in certain parts of people's lives. But when it comes to eating, it's just not the problem. It's not the fix.

Let's say you're in a meeting, and someone brings in a box of doughnuts. If you're dieting, now you need to resist a doughnut. That is going to take many, many acts of self-control. You don't just resist it when it comes into the room — you resist it when you look up and notice it, and that might happen 19 times, or 90 times. But if you eat it on the 20th time, it doesn't matter how good your willpower was. If you end up eating it, you don't get credit for having resisted it all those times. In virtually any other arena, that would be an A+, but in eating that's an F.

So it's for reasons like that that someone's willpower, which is measurable by the way, does not correlate with people's weight. It just doesn't. But, and here's the thing, it does correlate with tons of other stuff, like SAT scores, grade point average, and all kinds of other achievement outcomes. And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. If you're studying for an exam, and give in to checking Facebook, those 10 minutes that you waste don't erase the studying you did before. You haven't lost anything. Whereas with eating, when you suffer that one moment of weakness, it actually undoes all the successful willpower that came before it.

Although this all sounds depressing, I think that what we should draw from this is that we need to find a way of eating we can stick to for life and enjoy doing it and secondly, focus not on the scales but on the fact that the chosen way of eating is bringing health benefits even if the amount of weight lost is not what we'd like...we are still healthier than if we had not changed our lifestyle. Of course, this doesn't mean one shouldn't experiment with different tweaks to our way of eating that might bring further health (and perhaps more weightloss) but that we need to think about health first and weight second (and sustainability above all).

Hear hear! Sounds right to me

Too bad the article doesn't define what "lower weight than their set range" means in terms of something that is measurable.

All's not lost though, from another recent thread using a combination of subsiding symptoms and periodic blood test results could be used to refine one's practical real-world BMI.

According to Amanda Sainsbury-Salis the 'set point' is the weight you can't easily get under or stay over. When you lose weight below that point, for a week or so, your body returns to that point. If you put on a bit of weight, you soon lose it back to that point. It will be different for everyone. For me, it's just over 70 kg. I got there from 83kgs by a process of steps. I would lose weight to a new set point and stay there for a few months before I could go down to a new set point. I would love to continue down to another new set point, but try as I might, I can't get there. I did get below 70kgs the first summer of the Christmas challenge, but I soon crept up above 70. It gives me a BMI of 26 or 27 and I have to be happy with that. Like @carorees says, focus on health, not on weight. Very good quotes. Our biology conspires to keep us at a set point and it's not right to blame ourselves and feel a failure because we can't fight our biology. I certainly don't want to live like a starving person, so I make that choice.

Hi all!

Good to see so many of you here and to know that I'm not alone in the challenges I started to face after persistent fasting. Thanks to those of you who wondered were I was. I'm secretly a bit glad to have been missed. One never knows!

I had a wonderful vacation back towards the beginning of April. We drove 2300 miles down the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, down the coast of North Carolina, back up through the mountains, and then up through the Shenandoah Valley where my OH grew up. I'd never been there, so it was eye opening to see the kind of farm he had grown up in. We also got to go to the beach several times while there was still snow on our lawn at home.The water temperature of the Atlantic in North Carolina the first week of April is pretty much the same as the water temperature at the Massachusetts North Shore beaches in July! We ate quite a few memorable meals, including the best ice cream I've ever eaten (at Chincoteague in Virginia), and the best barbecue (12 Bones in Asheville.) We had one memorable sea food meal in New Bern, NC and some addictive Peach Cobbler in Wilmington, NC.

After we came home I decided that I would let go of the whole dieting thing for a while to repair my relationship with food, as the fasting had made me feel obsessed and I was having a terrible time not overeating. I stayed off of the scale for a while, knowing I was gaining some weight but feeling that it was probably necessary.

Over the past couple weeks I have started to feel like my eating is much more under control. I weigh in at 147 lbs which is within the range I usually maintain at but heading towards the top of that range. Unfortunately, my blood pressure, which had been great the whole time I was fasting started to deteriorate.

So I decided to cautiously return to some fasting, more for the blood pressure than the weight loss. I have a long history of having my blood pressure go crazily out of control even on a very low carb diet. Fasting is the onlyt thing that helped.

So I fasted today and it was pretty easy. I decided to be a bit less rigid and ate another 100 or so calories more than usual--closer to 600 than 450, but that let me eat a nice homemade chicken. romaine, mushroom and black rice burrito which was quite satisfying. (Thank you Trader Joe's for a Burrito I can eat without being horrified by the ingredients!)

We are planning an overnight at the beach towards the end of the week so I may not fast again until Saturday. That's fine. I don't want to be as rigid this time as it did not work out so well for me the last time when I did a strict 5:2. For now I am thinking of doing one or two fasts a week, perhaps alternating weeks with one and weeks with two fasts.

I must report that I have put on a lot of tummy fat over the past 2 months of eating freely. And my upper thighs are bumping into each other, which they didn't used to do except when I was another 20 lbs heavier than I a now. So even though I am back in my old maintenance range I am pudgier than I was before. I've also got back my double chin. OTOH, except for that blasted chin, my face looks much, much better. I didn't realize until I put some of the weight back on how haggard and wrinkled I was looking. If only my cheeks would plump up without the double chin being twice as plump.

At this point I think I would be happy to maintain around 145 lbs which is my long-term set point and one I proved I could maintain at. I bounced off that same 138 lbs that I bounced off several times in the past, and am coming to think that that is just not a feasible weight for me.

So it will be interesting to see if taking off 2 months was enough time to calm down my starvation response. If it isn't, I'll just fast one day a week and hope that helps the BP. I really would like to not have to take the meds going forward.

Dear @peebles, it IS good to hear from you again! Like many others, I had been wondering how you are. Your holiday sounds fantastic, how good to visit places that are special to your OH. I can totally understand how you felt fed up with "dieting" of any sort; taking a break is a good idea - and good that you now feel your eating is more in control. I also think a more relaxed approach to when you have a fast day is a good idea - judge when you fast by how you are feeling. (Lots of "goods" there!!)

I also empathise with you having more fat this time round for the same weight! Same thing happened to me... But looking less haggard is a bonus!

If you have caught up with all the posts in this thread you will see that I have become a fan of the Amanda Sainsbury-Salis " Don't go hungry" approach to diet/eating. I can't remember if you are familiar with her work, but I do recommend reading both her books. It is all based on being attuned to your body's hunger and satiety levels, and eating a wide variety of mainly whole foods. Plus some exercise.

Look forward to reading your future posts. Best wishes!

Hi Everyone.... I definitely need to be in this tent. I am extremely feeble on the fasting front. I seem to be so determined and stick to it for a couple of weeks and then boom, life gets in the way and I don't need much more than life as an excuse to turn to chocolate and wine. My 17 year old daughter was in the hospital and boy did I use food as a stress reliever (spending 24 hours a day at a hospital on your own can cause stress), needless to say I am back to my 61kgs and my RA is troubling me again, and I have developed what I think is heartburn (had to use google but it sounds like it is). So this time whilst I am hoping to lose the weight I have gained, I definitely need to do this to feel healthy again..... I just feel that the health benefits of fasting are beyond compare with anything else and I need to make that my focus and hope that weight loss will be an added benefit.
I used to do Mon, Wed & Fri and didn't seem to have a problem and then I don't know what happened but the desire just vanished.... So now I am going to alternate Tues & Thurs for one week and then Mon, Wed & Fri for two weeks..... and hopefully all my aches and pains will disappear again.

Good Morning!

Wobbling in for a fast today! First one in a week! I'll be quite happy if I stay around 800 calories today as I'm going to boot camp in a few minutes and may be too hungry to stick to 500. No worries.

@Peebles good to see you again! Sounds like you had an awesome trip to the Eastern shore. I love that area. Hope to see you posting often.

Over 15,000 steps on the pedometer yesterday from walking the golf course. I was a tired pup last night. Feel pretty good this morning, although I woke up at 2:30AM and kind of tossed and turned until I got up at 4:15. I'll need a nap this afternoon!

Have good days!

Dearest fellow wobblers
My heart is with you all as I too wobble about on here. I am so sad to read about the tough times some of you are going through right now. How I wish I had the magic words and a magic wand to wave about & make it all better....

Goodness, what battles we face on a daily basis. Fast days or feed days....both pose different challenges, don't they? We may not succeed all the time (being the "works in progress" that we are) but can I just remind everyone on here that we need to be so proud of ourselves for having the strength to try. In the first place! In the words of The Hollies: "The road is loooooong.....with many a winding turn.." My point is: we are all on that road! We chose to put ourselves on it, to call a halt to the weight gain. Hurrah for us! Nothing really worth achieving is easy....and weight loss is no exception. But we are made of stern stuff! We can re-group. We can modify our goals & plans...play the long game if we need to. If that includes taking time out from fasting, trying other things perhaps, then so be it.....but the biggest thing to remember here is to keep talking.

@candicemarie & @nursebean - you have both so inspired me since I joined back in Nov 13. I am so sorry that things aren't great right now. Just to make you smile, though, Candy - when I read one of your recent posts, I found myself wondering what "noncy ber" meant! Had never heard of it before. Well, that's how this brain read it anyway....instead of non-cyber!! What a twit I can be at times......

I know I'm rambling on, but I just want to pat you all on the back, remind you how far you have come and promise to be here a bit more for you. I am a bit of a withdrawer when things get too much...but that's exactly the time when I should come on here & talk....

You are all WWIP....Wonderful Works In Progress....and I am grateful to know you all xxx

Several people here have discussed the Salis approach, and it sounds like it has a lot going for it.

I am very aware of my eating patterns and I was coming off 10 years of maintaining a significant weight loss, very successfully, when I regained the weight that got me trying 5:2. My weight regain had been the result of having had an esophageal infection that took a long time to diagnose and made it impossible for me to take my usual meds and eat my usual way. I had controlled my weight by controlling carbs for all those years, but the infection made it impossible to eat fat without experiencing pain. So I had a good year of eating much more carb than is good for me, and that led to the weight coming back on.

But was because I am pretty aware that the abnormal appetite I developed over the last couple months on 5:2 really stuck out to me. In retrospect, I should have stopped fasting earlier than I did, but I got it in my head I was going to stick to it for a year, and stick to it I did, even as the weight started coming back on and my appetite got out of control.

My fast yesterday was very reasonable and today I am not feeling like I have to eat everything in sight, so that's encouraging. I will be tweaking here until I find a way that I can live with. What I CAN'T live with, alas, is eating to TDEE every day because I have hit the point where TDEE is so low--somewhere in the high 1400 calorie range--that it feels like eating a restrictive diet all the time. It is possible I might just have to accept being a bit heavier as I get older.

One big issue that hangs over me is that I watched my parents lose their ability to enjoy food as they aged, and I get the feeling that my senses aren't as sharp as they used to be, even now. So I feel that while I still can enjoy the pleasure of food, I should. I also saw both my parents become quite emaciated as they aged, even my mother who was seriously overweight at my age. I would hate to get to where food didn't appeal to me and wish that I had enjoyed it more when I still could. And right now, well, I still can!

But I do have to keep that BP under control. That's not negotiable. And fasting did do that. So it will be interesting to see what I can find that works. Fewer fasts? Regular fasts with say 650-700 calories a day rather than 450? I will be feeling my way towards an answer I can live with.

But I do agree that fighting our bodies is a losing strategy. When I maintained successfully, it involved vigilence, but not obsession, and I didn't feel miserable and deprived because I did build in treats into the way I ate. But for me the problem with Low Carb became that TDEE. It got so low that it was impossible to lose weight except by dropping to 1100 calories a day for months at a time, which is just too much. Plus I got really really tired of the food. It was fascinating to see myself get better blood sugar numbers eating more carbs when I was eating 5:2.

Hello again, this is one old timer who hasn't been here for a long time, I have been dipping in to see how you are all doing but like @@hazelnut20 I am a withdrawer when life issues get in the way. I am rubbish at supporting others on here, no words of wisdom are forthcoming so I keep quiet and watch from the sidelines. It was reading this thread and especially reading @@candicemarie posts, I just wanted to say that Candice has always been here with her cheery postings and I am sorry you are feeling a bit down. I have put 28lbs back on and am struggling to get back into 5:2, but I am carrying on with low sugar woe and my blood results are still good, I keep a check on them because I eat full natural fat but after 4 years eating this way I haven't keeled over yet.
I am caring for my mother who has Alzhiemers and she is going backwards in time, its sometimes freaks me out the things she says. My darling little westie Jack passed away about a month ago and she asks where he is when she comes to my house, I have to explain that we no longer have him he died and now she is talking about my dad as if he is still with us, I quickly change the subject and she forgets what she has said, but I am dreading if I have to explain that Dad died 6 yrs ago. It is the risk of this awful desease that keeps me doing at least 14 hours of fasting out of 24.
I am at the moment just trying not to put any more weight on but I think stress is preventing me losing.
To all of you who are having a rough time of it I am thinking of you.
Luv Chris x

Dear @chriso57, glad you felt able to come back to the forum - we have been missing you and quite a few other people of late.

Alzheimer's can be such a difficult thing to deal with. So sad to see how it affects loved ones. Have you other family members to support you in your caring role? Are you connected to any support groups? Sounds like you are handling things well, but it can be distressing for all involved. And losing Jack would not have helped at all... You would miss him so much.

It certainly can be very difficult managing your diet during times of stress, though of course this is the time when your body would benefit from good food. Are there some things you could do that fit in with your routine/lifestyle - cook up large pots of soup or similar and have a supply ready for quick meals. Have plenty of fruit and appropriate veggies available that you can snack on, or dried fruit and nuts that you can have with you. But I understand totally how having a chocolate biscuit (or 10), bit of cake, bag of crisps etc ends ip being what you eat... We have all been there. (Though you might not be doing these things of course.)

If you feel okay having 14 hour fasts every day, great! But if you are feeling hungry a lot of the time that might be adding to your stress and also causing you to eat too much once you eventually do eat. You need to look after yourself first and foremost and try to eat according to what your body needs. Best wishes and do keep in touch.

@Peebles, all sounds very frustrating for you. Quite a number of people on this forum have TDEE around 1400, I can understand how limiting that can feel. I assume you eat a lot of vegetables? I also understand how you want to enjoy all the lovely foods that are available. That's a difficult one! It does come down to choice, I guess... Though having seen what happened to your parents would have had a great impact on those choices. Good luck and best wishes for finding a solution that works for you.

And @Hazelnut20, a lovely post from you!